Bally Photos

One of the great things about the day before an NCAA subregional, regional or Final Four is that the public can come and watch the teams practice for free! This is enormous Ford Field in Detroit, which is normally used for American-style football. The stadium will have 72,000 available seats for this weekend -- for basketball! You can't tell from this shot, but the Davidson Wildcats are out there on the floor. Can you find Bally in this picture?

Well, here we are in Birmingham. I'm watching practices, asking dumb questions in press conferences, eating all the Cheetos at the media buffet spread, and waiting for the upsets to start happening on TV. While I'm doing Real Serious Work, Bally is living it up VIP style at the Big Dance. Follow along as he takes you behind the Madness, and hang out with his cool celebrity friends!

The picture above is not of our travelin' hoops buddy. This is Bally's distant cousin Orangey, who retired to Fort Myers a few years back, let himself go, and took a job at a tourist-trap fruit stand near the Minnesota Twins' spring-training camp. What a sell-out. Here are some other snapshots of our soon-to-be-annual Florida swing.

As you've probably gathered, we were in MAC and Horizon League country last week. There was a lot of snow, but Bally lives in my bookbag on the road and is generally unaffected by weather. It's warm in there.

There's more than one Bally, and that's because we occasionally hold contests here and give away real-life versions of the cartoon buddy who goes everywhere with me on my travels. Like, for instance, our Hunan: Return Of The Phoenix movie treatment contest, which might be extended an extra day because the entries are so awesome, and we want more, more, more awesomeness.

Anyway, speaking of awesomeness, there's a secret e-mail address on the polybag that the orange guy comes in, along with an invitation to take him to games and send in pictures. And as you might know, UNC-Asheville beat Winthrop 71-56 on Saturday, and it was a crucial (and awesome) Big South game that provided separation in a league that WU has lorded over for seeming centuries.

But longtime reader and local legend Rod in Asheville, in bringing a certain friend to the game, set the Bally bar about as high as it could go. Anybody who sends in snapshots from here on out will have to face the inevitable comparisons to Rod's entries, and I just hope that this doesn't dissuade anybody from future submissions out of pure shame. After the jump, we have Bally with hot girls, and that's what you -- the future picture sender-inner -- have to compete with.

I'm just going to sit back over here in the corner, and let Rod take the story from here.

Bally really enjoyed his visit to the Lawlor Center, home of the Nevada Wolf Pack. Nearly every seat is a season ticket, and when the home team isn't around, it hosts events like big-time wrestling and the Bull-Nanza. Bally really wanted to go to the Bull-Nanza.

Folks sometimes ask me why I use the word "we" so much on the site. It's not anything "royal," not at all. Wherever I go on the hoops highway, I've got a little buddy who comes with me everywhere. He's orange, and his name is Bally.

Give a live-action cartoon basketball an all-access pass to Hoops Nation's toughest conference, an unlimited expense account and all the press room pizza he can eat... what kind of trouble will he get himself into?